HOSA

HOSA, “Health Occupations Students of America”, is a nationally recognized educational healthcare organization with a brand new chapter starting at Valley. At a local level, HOSA encourages and fosters volunteer work in the medical field, and actively creates opportunities for member students to explore their interests in health careers by attending healthcare conferences.

At the state and national level, HOSA acts as a competitive arena for students to contend in over 50 different areas all based in health care: such as medical spelling bees, biomedical debate, speech, writing, medical photography, presentation, drama, art/artistic interpretation, and many more! National competitions this year will be held at Disney World in Florida, where there will always be a number of influential keynote speakers. (We have had Ben Carson, Michio Kaku, and the Surgeon General of the United States, for example.)

We further act as an outlet for community involvement by sponsoring and organizing student-led volunteer/community projects. This year we created a Thanksgiving food drive where we were able to collect over 126 lbs of food for families in West Des Moines, and we hope to organize and host an awareness walk for mental illness with NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness). We are an exciting club (with food at every meeting) that builds a body of students all with the same drive of success in medicine.

The club is open, but only for a short period of time. Students are required to fill out an online form, which is open typically until the second weekend of November. There are no auditions or pre-requisites, but a registration fee is asked of members.